Chapter 5: Non Combat Encounters
NO D&D GAME consists of endless combat. You need other challenges to spice up and add variety to adventures. Sometimes these challenges are combined with combat encounters, making for really interesting and strategic situations. Other times, an encounter completely revolves around character skills and social interactions. This chapter is your guide to running and creating encounters that feature skill challenges, puzzles, traps, and hazards. This chapter includes the following sections.
✦ Skill Challenges: When characters make skill checks in response to a series of changing conditions, with success or failure being uncertain, they’re in a skill challenge. Scouring the jungle for a hidden temple or persuading the duke to send aid to defend the pass might both be skill challenge encounters, relying heavily on very different skills. Learn to run skill challenges, creating your own according to the guidelines presented here, and see how to combine skill challenges with combat encounters to create truly memorable situations.
✦ Puzzles: Some D&D adventures feature puzzles. Some DMs believe puzzles should test the characters, and see puzzles as a form of skill challenge. Others see puzzles as a challenge for the players, and welcome the variety and hands-on nature of puzzles that they can solve personally or as a group. Use puzzles as either sort of challenge in your game.
✦ Traps and Hazards: Traps and hazards are inanimate threats to life, limb, mind, or spirit. They fill roles similar to monsters in encounters or stand as encounters on their own. Learn how to use traps and hazards, and select from numerous examples to use or modify for your adventures.
Skill Challenges
An audience with the duke, a mysterious set of sigils in a hidden chamber, finding your way through the Forest of Neverlight—all of these present challenges that test both the characters and the people who play them. The difference between a combat challenge and a skill challenge isn’t the presence or absence of physical risk, nor the presence or absence of attack rolls and damage rolls and power use. The difference is in how the encounter treats PC actions. Skill challenges can account for all the action in a particular encounter, or they can be used as part of a combat encounter to add variety and a sense of urgency to the proceedings.
THE BASICS
To deal with a skill challenge, the player characters make skill checks to accumulate a number of successful skill uses before they rack up too many failures and end the encounter. Example: The PCs seek a temple in dense jungle. Achieving six successes means they find their way. Accruing three failures before achieving the successes, however, indicates that they get themselves hopelessly lost in the wilderness.
DESIGNING SKILL CHALLENGES
More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure. Adventurers can fight a group of five foulspawn in just about any 8th- to 10th-level adventure, but a skill challenge that requires the PCs to unmask the doppelganger in the baron’s court is directly related to the particular adventure and campaign it’s set in. Follow these steps to design skill challenges for your adventures.
What’s the goal of the challenge? Where does the challenge take place? Who is involved in this challenge? Is it a stand-alone skill challenge or a skill challenge as part of a combat encounter? Define the goal of the challenge and what obstacles the characters face to accomplish that goal. The goal has everything to do with the overall story of the adventure. Success at the challenge should be important to the adventure, but not essential. You don’t want a series of bad skill checks to bring the adventure to a grinding halt. At worst, failure at the challenge should send the characters on a long detour, thereby creating a new and interesting part of the adventure. Give as much attention to the setting of the skill challenge as you do to the setting of the rest of the adventure. You might not need a detailed map full of interesting terrain for a skill challenge, but an interesting setting helps set the tone for the encounter. If the challenge involves any kind of interaction with nonplayer characters or monsters, detail those characters as well. In a complex social encounter, have a clear picture of the motivations, goals, and interests of the NPCs involved so you can tie them to character skill checks. A skill challenge can serve as an encounter in and of itself, or it can be combined with monsters as part of a combat encounter.
What level is the challenge? What is the challenge’s complexity? Choose a grade of complexity, from 1 to 5 (1 being simple, 5 being complex). Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved, while the grade of complexity determines how many successes the characters need to overcome the challenge, and how many failures end the challenge. The more complex a challenge, the more skill checks are required, and the greater number of successes needed to overcome it. Set the complexity based on how significant you want the challenge to be. If you expect it to carry the same weight as a combat encounter, a complexity of 5 makes sense. A challenge of that complexity takes somewhere between 12 and 18 total checks to complete, and the characters should earn as much experience for succeeding as they would for a combat encounter of the same level (it’s the same as taking on five monsters of the challenge’s level). For quicker, less significant challenges, or for challenges that work as part of a combat encounter, set the complexity lower. (Figure that each complexity is the equivalent of that number of monsters of the challenge’s level.) Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party, and use moderate DCs for the skill checks (see the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on page 42). If you use easy DCs, reduce the level of the challenge by one. If you use hard DCs, increase the level of the challenge by two. You can also adjust the level of the challenge by reducing the number of failures needed to end the challenge. Cut the number of failures needed in half, and increase the level of the challenge by two. Example: A complexity 3 challenge using hard DCs and cutting the number of failures needed in half increases this skill challenge’s level by four.
What skills naturally contribute to the solution of the challenge? How do characters use these skills in the challenge? Certain skills lead to the natural solutions to the problem the challenge presents. These should serve as the primary skills in the challenge. Give some thought to which skills you select here, keeping in mind the goal of involving all the players in the action. You know what skills your player characters are good at, so make sure to include some chances for every character to shine. In general, it’s a good idea to include a mix of interaction skills (Bluff, Diplomacy), knowledge-based skills (Arcana, Nature), and physical skills (Athletics, Acrobatics) in the challenge, either as primary or as secondary skills. These general sorts of skills play to the strengths of most characters. Start with a list of the challenge’s primary skills, then give some thought to what a character might do when using that skill. You don’t need to make an exhaustive list, but try to define categories of actions the characters might take. Sometimes characters might decide to do exactly what you anticipate, but often you need to take what a player wants to do and find the closest match to the actions you’ve outlined. When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it. If a player wants to use a skill you didn’t identify as a primary skill in the challenge, however, then the DC for using that secondary skill is hard. The use of the skill might win the day in unexpected ways, but the risk is greater as well. In addition, a secondary skill can never be used by a single character more than once in a challenge. Always keep in mind that players can and will come up with ways to use skills you do not expect. Stay on your toes, and let whatever improvised skill uses they come up with guide the rewards and penalties you apply afterward. Remember that not everything has to be directly tied to the challenge. Tangential or unrelated benefits, such as making unexpected allies from among the duke’s court or finding a small, forgotten treasure, can also be fun.
What other conditions might apply to the challenge? Do the ogre mercenaries demand payment every 10 minutes they allow you to talk to them? Or is there an energy-draining field in the Labyrinth of Shadows that applies increasing penalties over the length of the characters’ intrusion? These other conditions can impose a sense of urgency on a skill challenge or comprise part of the penalty for failing at the challenge. If you put a monetary cost on the challenge (as in the example of the ogre mercenaries), try to make up that cost in treasure if the characters succeed at the challenge. If they fail, the cost is part of the penalty they pay. It’s also a good idea to think about other options the characters might exercise and how these might influence the course of the challenge. Characters might have access to utility powers or rituals that can help them. These might allow special uses of skills, perhaps with a bonus. Rituals in particular might grant an automatic success or remove failures from the running total.
What happens if the characters successfully complete the challenge? What happens if they fail? When the skill challenge ends, reward the characters for their success (with challenge-specific rewards, as well as experience points) or assess penalties for their failure. A skill challenge’s complexity, combined with its level, defines its value in experience points. A skill challenge is worth the same XP as a number of monsters of its level equal to its complexity. Thus, a 7th-level challenge with a complexity of 1 is worth 300 XP (the same as one 7th-level monster), while a 7th-level challenge with a complexity of 5 is worth 1,500 XP—the same as a 7th-level combat encounter. You can also decide to allocate some of the adventure’s treasure to the challenge. Beyond those fundamental rewards, the characters’ success should have a significant impact on the story of the adventure. Additional rewards might include information, clues, and favors, as well as simply moving the adventure forward. If the characters fail the challenge, the story still has to move forward, but in a different direction and possibly by a longer, more dangerous route. You can think of it like a room in a dungeon. If the characters can’t defeat the dragon in that room, they don’t get the experience for killing it or the treasure it guards, and they can’t go through the door on the opposite side of the room. They might still be able to get to the chamber behind the door, but by taking a different and more arduous path. In the same way, failure in a skill challenge should send the characters down a different route in the adventure, but not derail them entirely. In addition, failing a skill challenge might make some future encounters more difficult. The angry baron might throw more obstacles in the characters’ path or, alerted to their plans, increase his defenses.
RUNNING A SKILL CHALLENGE
Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. Running the challenge itself is not all that different from running a combat encounter (see Chapter 3). You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results. The skill challenge description outlines the skills that are useful for the challenge and the results of using them. Roll initiative to establish an order of play for the skill challenge. If the skill challenge is part of a combat encounter, work the challenge into the order just as you do the monsters. In a skill challenge encounter, every player character must make skill checks to contribute to the success or failure of the encounter. Characters must make a check on their turn using one of the identified primary skills (usually with a moderate DC) or they must use a different skill, if they can come up with a way to use it to contribute to the challenge (with a hard DC). A secondary skill can be used only once by a single character in any given skill challenge. They can also decide, if appropriate, to cooperate with another character (see “Group Skill Checks,” below). Sometimes, a player tells you, “I want to make a Diplomacy check to convince the duke that helping us is in his best interest.” That’s great—the player has told you what she’s doing and what skill she’s using to do it. Other times, a player will say, “I want to make a Diplomacy check.” In such a case, prompt the player to give more information about how the character is using that skill. Sometimes, characters do the opposite: “I want to scare the duke into helping us.” It’s up to you, then, to decide which skill the character is using and call for the appropriate check. You can also make use of the “DM’s best friend” rule to reward particularly creative uses of skills (or penalize the opposite) by giving a character a +2 bonus or –2 penalty to the check. Then, depending on the success or failure of the check, describe the consequences, and go on to the next action.
Sometimes a skill challenge calls for a group skill check. When the party is climbing a cliff, everyone needs to roll an Athletics check to climb. In this case, allow one character to be the lead climber. This character makes the actual check to gain a success or failure. The others make checks to help the lead character, in effect aiding that character, but their checks provide neither a success nor a failure toward resolving the challenge. Each ally that gets a result of 10 or higher provides a +2 bonus to the lead character’s check (to a maximum bonus of +8).
In a combat encounter, the players already know a great deal about how to overcome the challenge. They know that the monsters possess defenses and hit points, and that everyone acts in initiative order. Furthermore, they know exactly what happens when their own attacks hit—and after a few rounds, they have a good sense of the likelihood of their attacks hitting. But a skill challenge is a different story. When the PCs are delving through the Underdark in search of the ruined dwarven fortress of Gozar-Duun, they don’t necessarily know how the game adjudicates that search. They don’t know what earns successes, to put it in game terms, until you tell them. You can’t start a skill challenge until the PCs know their role in it, and that means giving them a couple of skills to start with. It might be as simple as saying, “You’ll use Athletics checks to scale the cliffs, but be aware that a failed check might dislodge some rocks on those climbing below you.” If the PCs are trying to sneak into the wizard’s college, tell the players, “Your magical disguises, the Bluff skill, and knowledge of the academic aspects of magic—Arcana, in other words— will be key in this challenge.”
Engage multiple PCs by making a spread of skills relevant. It makes some sense for one character trained in Diplomacy to do all the talking, but it’s no more fun than one character doing all the fighting. Instead, multiple skills are relevant in every skill challenge, just as a wizard and a rogue are both important in combat. In a skill challenge, every character has something to do, so no player is bored. Whether it’s the use of a primary or secondary skill, or whether a character is cooperating to help another character make a check, every character participates in a skill challenge. As always, give the players the information they need to make smart choices. Make it clear what skills are useful in a challenge. The players don’t have to know every skill that can earn them successes at the start, but they must know some. And make sure to tell them when a check result provides a success or a failure—if the players don’t know if they’re doing well or not, they don’t know how to proceed. You can’t engage players if they don’t know how to interact with the challenge.
Thinking players are engaged players. In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. Instead, let them make a roll using the skill but at a hard DC, or make the skill good for only one success. This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth and engages more players by making more skills useful. However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks, “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help the party survive in the uninhabited sandy wastes by using that skill. Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge. Example: The cleric wants to know if his Religion skill can give him some idea where the cultists would build their temple. If he beats a hard DC, he’s sure that the cultists would build their temple near a river. The fighter wants to climb a tree with Athletics to get a good vantage point on the surrounding forest, thinking that gaps in the trees might indicate the presence of a river. That’s an easy DC check. Once these characters use the skills in that way, though, they can’t use them again—Religion and Athletics, in this case, are good for only one success in this particular challenge.
Skill challenges require the players to make rolls at specific times. Call for these checks according to the pace of the narrative and the nature of the challenge. This might be each round on their turns, during each short or extended rest, or some other time frame as determined by the challenge in question. Skill checks usually count as successes or failures for the challenge, but sometimes a specific use of a certain skill in a challenge just provides a minor benefit or penalty. Examples: When forging a trail through the jungle, every character has to make an Endurance check after each extended rest to stay healthy. Characters who fail lose one healing surge until the challenge ends, but the party doesn’t accrue any failures for these checks. In the middle of tense negotiations with the duke, the castellan might interrupt to challenge the PCs on a point of etiquette. Success on a Diplomacy check doesn’t count as a success toward the challenge total, but it could provide a bonus to the next check in interacting with the duke, or win a small favor from the castellan.
Skill challenges have consequences, positive and negative, just as combat encounters do. When the characters overcome a skill challenge, they earn the same rewards as when they slay monsters in combat— experience and perhaps treasure. The consequences of total defeat are often obvious: no XP and no treasure. Success or failure in a skill challenge also influences the course of the adventure—the characters locate the temple and begin infiltrating it, or they get lost and must seek help. In either case, however, the adventure continues. With success, this is no problem, but don’t fall into the trap of making progress dependent on success in a skill challenge. Failure introduces complications rather than ending the adventure. If the characters get lost in the jungle, that leads to further challenges, not the end of the adventure.
Puzzles
Puzzles in a D&D game present a unique form of challenge, one that tests the capabilities of the players at the table instead of their characters. Combat is a tactical challenge for the players, and many traps and skill challenges present puzzlelike elements, but they also involve plenty of die rolling to represent the characters’ abilities. A puzzle, generally speaking, does not. Furthermore, puzzles present a challenge to players that’s usually independent of their experience with the game. Experienced players have an edge in combat or skill challenges because of their familiarity with the rules and situations of the game. Unless a puzzle relies on game knowledge, it’s just as accessible to someone who has never played D&D before as it is to the hardened veteran. That makes a puzzle a great challenge to throw in front of a group that includes both experienced and new players—as long as you know that the new players have some interest in and facility with puzzles. It gives the new players a chance to join in the game on an equal footing. The basic nature of puzzles—that they rely on player ability—is the reason that some people love puzzles in the game and some people dislike them. Players who enjoy puzzles and are reasonably good at solving them generally like running into them in the course of an adventure. Players who don’t like puzzles, or who balk at the idea that a 25th-level wizard with a 26 Intelligence can’t solve a simple number square, find puzzles an intrusion into the game. Looking at the motivations of your players (see Chapter 1), you’ll find that puzzles engage some explorers and many thinkers, and they can grab a surprising number of watchers, but instigators, power gamers, and slayers quickly get impatient with them. If your group consists mostly of the latter types of players, it’s best to steer away from puzzles. As with all types of challenges, don’t overuse puzzles. A dungeon that is nothing but one puzzle after another can be fun for a little while, but before long the players will start wondering whether they’re playing D&D or just working through a book of puzzles. Watch your players for signs of boredom or frustration, and head them off with hints or even a combat encounter sprung on the characters to interrupt their work on the puzzle.
IS A PUZZLE AN ENCOUNTER
Although this discussion of puzzles appears in a chapter about noncombat encounters, a puzzle isn’t always an encounter. An encounter, by definition, involves a meaningful risk of failure. It’s possible for a puzzle to fit that definition, particularly if it’s paired with a trap or if it involves an encounter with a monster such as a sphinx. Other puzzles, though, aren’t encounters. They might be obstacles in the characters’ path, but ones they can find other ways around. As a rule of thumb, you can treat a puzzle as an encounter if there’s a definite time limit to solving it, particularly if there’s physical or other serious risk to failing to solve the puzzle in that time. Otherwise, it’s not an encounter.
USING PUZZLES
A puzzle can be an intriguing way to start an adventure: The earl is kidnapped, and a cryptogram is found in his bedchamber. A cryptic prophecy leads the characters to seek—or prevent—its fulfillment. A map makes no sense until the characters read it in a mirror, and then it leads them to the dungeon. A sphinx has taken up residence in a mountain pass and won’t let anyone through unless they can answer a riddle—and so far, no one has. More commonly, puzzles can serve exactly the same role as other obstacles and challenges in the game, including monsters, hazards, and physical barriers—they stand between the characters and their goal, forcing the characters to solve them or find a way around them. The treasure chest won’t open until the characters place the colored stones in the correct spaces on the grid, following a simple rule: Each row, each column, and each subsection of the grid must contain exactly one of each color of stone. The door to the ancient shrine can be opened only by saying nine prayers to the god the shrine was dedicated to, whose name is concealed in a puzzle. The minotaurs have trapped their captives in the heart of a sprawling labyrinth. Some puzzles conceal a message that’s important for the characters to learn, anything from “The baron is a mind flayer” to “The third door holds no trap.” Word puzzles work well for concealed messages, particularly cryptograms, word searches (the leftover letters spell the message), and quotation puzzles. Other puzzles are a matter of the players figuring something out in the context of the adventure. Given a limited set of facts about the three sons of Emperor Darvan the Mad and the three crypts beneath the ruined imperial palace, the characters need to determine which son is buried in the Crypt of the Disgraced—a complex logic puzzle.
TYPES OF PUZZLES
Riddles are a form of puzzle with an illustrious history going back to the Greek legends of the sphinx, not to mention The Hobbit. That classic form of the “What am I?” riddle basically consists of a series of clues couched in intentionally obscure language. Solving such a riddle is a matter of understanding the less obvious meaning of the riddle’s words. For example: In daytime I lie pooled about, At night I cloak like mist. I creep inside shut boxes and Inside your tightened fist. You see me best when you can’t see, For I do not exist. Apparent paradoxes, plays on words, and metaphor conceal the riddle’s answer: darkness. Cryptograms are written word puzzles in which the letters are replaced with other letters or symbols. An easy cryptogram uses a pattern of substitution, such as using the next letter of the alphabet (use B for A, C for B, and so on). Harder ones use no pattern, matching letters more or less at random. Instead of letters, you can use runes or other symbols to spell out a message. Word searches are grids of letters that conceal words written horizontally, vertically, or diagonally across the grid, forward or backward. You can give the players a list of words to find, or use tightly themed words (the names of gemstones, for example) and force the players to find all the words themselves. Word searches can conceal a message either by reading the letters left behind when all the words have been found, or by arranging the words themselves into sentences. Quotation puzzles are perfect for concealing messages. In a quotation box, a message is laid out in a grid, then the letters in each column are arranged in alphabetical order instead of their natural order. The players have to rearrange the letters to spell out the message. An acrostic is similar, but the letters of the message are scrambled and divided up among different words. Players decipher clues to identify the words, then match the letters of those words to letters in the message using a numbered key. Many newspapers run acrostic puzzles on a regular basis. Crossword puzzles include crisscross puzzles, where the goal is to fit all the words from a list into a provided grid of crossing lines, and fully crossed puzzles like you find in most newspapers. A crisscross can hide a message spelled out by shaded squares in the grid, while a fully crossed puzzle is better as an obstacle the characters must solve to get past. Another common newspaper puzzle is easy to adapt as an obstacle puzzle: a number grid. In place of numbers, you can use any set of distinct symbols, colored gems, coins, or other items. Given a few numbers or symbols already placed, the object is straightforward: fill in the grid so that each number or symbol occurs exactly once in each row, once in each column, and once in each subsection of the grid. (A typical number grid is 9 × 9, with nine 3 × 3 subsections.) In a logic puzzle, the players figure out an answer by using clues to winnow all the possibilities down to a single answer. For example: Emperor Darvan the Mad had three sons. The oldest, Fieran, was killed by his brother’s hand. Madrash knew no fury. Delvan was the youngest. The three sons wielded three legendary swords, which were buried with them. Fury’s Heart was never touched by a righteous hand. Night’s Embrace was untainted by royal blood. Death’s Chill slew the orc chieftain Ghash Aruk. Having learned that much, the adventurers now stand in the antechamber before the crypts of the three brothers and read the inscriptions on their doors. The Crypt of the Disgraced holds the son who murdered his brother. The Crypt of the Innocent holds the blameless son who died of old age. The Crypt of the Righteous, undimmed by night, holds the paladin son. The characters need to determine which son and which sword lie in the Crypt of the Disgraced. A careful reading of the clues and application of logic reveal that the Crypt of the Disgraced holds Delvan, who used Fury’s Heart to murder his brother. Mazes are classic puzzles often associated with minotaurs (thanks to Greek legend), but you should use them with caution in a dungeon adventure. Exploration that consists purely of a description of turns and dead ends is not exactly riveting, and usually involves only the DM and the player who is trying to make a map. Used with caution—and spiced with traps and monsters—a maze can be an effective puzzle. Typically, dungeon builders design mazes to keep someone from leaving (as Daedalus did to imprison the original minotaur), to keep something safe from intruders, or as a trap, to prevent those who wander in from ever getting out. (As a trap, a maze works best if a wall or rubble falls behind the characters when they enter, preventing them from simply retracing their steps.
DESIGNING PUZZLES
Unless you have a particular fondness or facility for creating puzzles, the best way to design puzzles for your D&D game is to steal shamelessly. You can find shelves full of puzzle books and magazines in any bookstore, and the Internet has an abundant supply. Sometimes you can use puzzles exactly as you find them, but other times a puzzle works best if you tweak and customize it to the game’s setting and the context of the adventure.
A lot of published riddles are very culture-specific or aimed at young children, or else so well known that they don’t offer your players any challenge. However, it’s not too hard to change the details of a riddle and give it a new face that makes it harder to figure it out. For example, consider the classic riddle of the sphinx: “What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” That riddle is well known enough that you probably can’t use it in an adventure as it is. But if you change its fundamental metaphor (the time of day) and couch the idea of going about on varying numbers of legs in a new metaphor, you can disguise the riddle: In spring four pillars hold me up, a shining dome above the earth. In summer two pillars support me, a doorway into mystery. In autumn three pillars stand beneath me, a temple of the Bright City. In winter my pillars are crumbled to dust, a ruin of ancient glory. The answer to the riddle is the same—a person, who crawls on hands and knees as an infant, walks on two legs in the prime of life, and uses a cane for support in old age. Using the seasons instead of the time of day as a metaphor for the stages of life is a simple change, and it adds a natural fourth couplet to further disguise the riddle. Instead of the fairly literal mention of legs in the original riddle, we switch to the metaphor of pillars and add different metaphors for the person in each stage of life. When you’re making a riddle of your own, synonyms and metaphors are your friends. Start with an idea of the riddle’s answer, which ideally is a clue to the plot of your adventure. Then brainstorm a list of the qualities that thing possesses. Once you have that list, you can couch each quality in metaphorical or intentionally obscure language, and you have a basic riddle.
Cryptograms are the easiest puzzles to create. You can make a simple one by choosing a pattern, such as replacing each letter with another one some number of letters later in the alphabet (wrapping around to the beginning when you reach Z, of course). Or just make yourself a key, taking care not to use the same letter twice (unless you want a fiendishly difficult puzzle). If you find published cryptograms that use symbols you like, you can adopt those symbols for your own puzzle. Once you have your key, run the letters of your message through it and give the result to your players.
You might have a hard time finding word searches that are at all relevant to the world that D&D characters know, but word searches are also pretty easy to construct. Start with a blank grid (such as a piece of graph paper), then make a list of words that share some common theme. One approach is to use the words of the message you want the players to piece together. Or you might use the names of gemstones, aberrant monsters, or rulers from the ancient dynasties of Bael Turath for a really difficult challenge (difficult because unfamiliar words are harder to spot than familiar ones). Then place those words into the grid in every direction (don’t forget backward, including diagonals). Start with the longest words, and work down to the shortest. If you want the players to piece together a message from the letters that aren’t used to make words, make sure you leave room for those letters. Once you have all your words placed, fill in the empty squares, either with the letters of your hidden message or with random letters. Making a crossword puzzle is a very similar task. In both kinds of puzzles you’re arranging words from a list in intersecting patterns.
A quotation box is easy to design. First, write out the short message you want to deliver, then count the number of letters in the message. (A message longer than 120 letters gets pretty unwieldy.) Don’t count spaces or punctuation, but do include hyphens and apostrophes. Divide the number of letters by 3 for an easy puzzle, 6 for a really hard puzzle, or some number in between. Then take a piece of graph paper and count out squares across equal to your new number, rounding up. Count squares down equal to the number you used to divide the total. Then write out the message, putting one letter in each square and drawing lines between squares at the ends of words. When you reach the end of a line, continue in the leftmost square of the next line. When you’re done, if you have any blank squares at the end, fill them in with black squares. Below your message, write down the letters in each column, rearranging them into alphabetical order. Those are the letters you’ll then copy onto a new piece of paper for the players to solve. An acrostic is harder to create, but if you understand how to solve them it’s a fairly obvious process. The real challenge is in finding clued words that use all of the letters in the original message, without using any letters twice or leaving any out.
There’s no reason to create your own number grid when there’s an abundance of puzzles you can steal. The puzzle will feel more esoteric to your players if you replace the numbers with symbols, colored gemstones in a grid carved into stone doors, or letters that spell out a nine-letter word. (Remember that your nine-letter word can’t use the same letter twice!) As with a cryptogram, make yourself a key—you might replace every occurrence of the number 1 with a C, for example. If your puzzle spells out a word in one row or column, you might want to give the players a clue to the word to help them solve the puzzle.
Logic puzzles are also pretty easy to steal and adapt. If you come across a puzzle in which you need to correctly match each of three children with the color of his shirt and his favorite fruit, you can translate each child into one of Emperor Darvan’s three sons, each color into one of the three legendary swords, and each fruit into a crypt. The trick is in translating the clues. Fundamentally, each clue in a logic puzzle amounts to a fact such as, “Object A isn’t connected to object 2,” whether A is a crypt or a fruit and 2 is a sword or a color. Sometimes a puzzle uses a positive assertion instead (“Object A is connected to object 2”), but that makes the puzzle simpler. If you boil the clues from your example puzzle down into that form, it gets easier to translate them. The real fun of a logic puzzle is presenting it in your adventure. Unlike a puzzle you find in a magazine, the clues don’t have to be presented neatly arranged in one place—the entire adventure can consist of assembling clues that are scattered through ancient libraries and crumbling ruins. You can also use a logic puzzle as the structure of a mystery adventure, as the characters piece together clues that ultimately reveal a killer, a motive, and a an accomplice.
PUZZLE AS A SKILL CHALLENGE
The voice flowed out of the statue, a cold, distant sound. “What are the four virtues of Keblor Kest? Answer now, before time runs out!” You can also set up a puzzle as a skill challenge. In this example, the PCs make appropriate skill checks to simulate their characters solving the clues of the puzzle. If they achieve the listed number of successes before failures, they solve the puzzle and earn the reward. If they achieve the listed number of failures first, however, they fail to solve the puzzle and must suffer the consequences. Setup: To open the door to the secret chamber, the PCs must solve the riddle of the statue. After each success, the voice says, “Good, you remember Keblor’s greatness.” After each failure, the voice says, “You know nothing of Keblor’s greatness and time is running out!” Level: Equal to the level of the party. Complexity: 1 (requires 4 successes before 2 failures). Primary Skills: Arcana, History, Insight, Religion. Arcana (moderate DCs): You call upon your knowledge of magical lore to remember one of the four virtues. History (hard DCs): You call upon your knowledge of history to remember some forgotten bit of information pertaining to the four virtues of Keblor Kest. Insight (moderate DCs): You try to discern something to help support the rest of your party. Using this skill doesn’t count as a success or failure for the challenge, but instead provides a +2 bonus or –2 penalty to the next character’s Arcana, History, or Religion skill check. Religion (easy DCs): As a religious figure of some renown, this skill provides the best route to solving the puzzle of the statue. You call upon your knowledge of religious lore to remember one of the four virtues. Success: If the PCs gain 4 successes before attaining 2 failures, the party solves the riddle, and the statue slides open to reveal the entrance to the secret chamber. Failure: If the PCs attain 2 failures before gaining 4 successes, the party fails to solve the riddle before time runs out. The statue animates and attacks the party. Start a combat encounter.
Traps and Hazards
One wrong step in an ancient tomb triggers a series of scything blades that cleave through armor and bone. The seemingly innocuous vines that hang over a cave entrance grasp and choke at anyone foolish enough to push through them. A narrow stone bridge leads over a pit filled with hissing, sputtering acid. In the D&D game, monsters are only one of many challenges that adventurers face. If it can hurt the party, but it isn’t a monster, it’s either a trap or a hazard.
TRAP OR HAZARD?
What’s the difference between a trap and a hazard? Traps are constructed with the intent to damage, harry, or impede intruders. Hazards are natural or supernatural in origin, but typically lack the malicious intent of a trap. Though both feature similar risks, a pit covered with a goblin-constructed false floor is a trap, while a deep chasm between two sections of a troglodyte cave constitutes a hazard. Traps tend to be hidden, and their danger is apparent only when they are discovered with keen senses or a misplaced step. The danger of a hazard is usually out in the open, and its challenge determined by the senses (sometimes far too late) or deduced by those knowledgeable of the hazard’s environs. The common link between traps and hazards revolves around peril—both to adventurers and monsters. Because of this similarity, traps and hazards feature similar rules, conventions, and presentations.
PERCEIVING TRAPS AND HAZARDS
When the party is within line of sight of a trap, compare each character’s passive Perception check with the DCs of the traps in the room. A PC whose passive Perception is equal to or higher than the DCs notices the trap or the relevant aspect of the trap. Other skills might also play a role in allowing PCs to notice traps or identify hazards, such as Dungeoneering and Nature. Of course, PCs can always try an active Perception check as a minor action to find any traps they missed with their passive check. PCs most often decide to roll an active Perception check when some aspect of the trap becomes apparent.
TRIGGERING TRAPS AND HAZARDS
Traps and hazards act without a hint of intelligence, so their behavior is predictable, even if it’s sometimes random. A trap is constructed to go off when certain conditions are met—from a character stepping on a pressure-sensitive flagstone in the floor to intruders entering the evil temple without wearing the symbol of the deity it’s dedicated to. When triggered, traps and hazards either attack or activate and roll initiative, acting every round in initiative order.
ATTACKS AND EFFECTS
A trap’s attack is limited only by the imagination of its creator. A blade cuts across the corridor, making melee attacks. Flames shoot out in close blasts. Rubble drops from the ceiling in an area burst. Arrows shoot out from the wall, making ranged attacks. Trap attacks use the same rules as creature attacks, but a trap’s ranged attacks and area attacks do not provoke opportunity attacks.
COUNTERING TRAPS AND HAZARDS
While the best way to counter a trap or hazard is to avoid it, sometimes that’s not possible. That leaves characters with three approaches to countering the obstacle: break it, disable it, or outsmart it. Destroying a trap or hazard with a weapon or attacks is often difficult, if not impossible—arrow traps are typically protected by walls or shielding, magic traps have a habit of blowing up when attacked, and very few attacks can counter that huge boulder rumbling down the corridor. But attacking and destroying a trap may be the best way to defeat it in a pinch. Most traps can be disabled or delayed with the Thievery skill. Sometimes other skills and abilities can supplement the Thievery check. When a character delays a trap, the trap stops functioning for a period of time (until the end of the character’s next turn, with a 50% chance each round that it reactivates after that). Disabling a trap takes the trap out of commission until someone makes the effort to repair or reset it. While it’s delayed or disabled, the trap effectively isn’t there. You can outsmart a trap or hazard. Figuring out a trap’s location and avoiding the pressure plates is a sure way of doing this, but more subtle and interesting methods sometimes apply. Many traps have interesting countermeasures other than destroying, delaying, or disabling them that make it possible for a variety of characters to foil or even defeat them.
PLACING TRAPS AND HAZARDS
Traps and hazards fit into an encounter much like an additional monster. Every trap or hazard has a level (and an appropriate XP value for that level), so you can figure it in as part of an encounter that includes monsters to determine the appropriate reward for defeating it. For example, an encounter for five 10thlevel PCs might include four 10th-level monsters and one 10th-level trap. Defeating the trap, just like defeating the monster, earns the party 500 XP.
TRAPS AND HAZARD ROLES
Although traps and hazards can take the place of a monster in your encounter design, they aren’t monsters. They attack differently, their effects can debilitate, and they can be difficult to spot at first. What traps and hazards usually don’t do is choose from a variety of attacks, move into advantageous position, or even choose their target. And they typically don’t take actions that aren’t strictly defined by their construction or nature. That is the fundamental difference between a trap or hazard and a monster. Because of these differences, traps and hazards have their own roles that loosely correspond to monster roles. Like monster roles, they give you an idea of how a trap or hazard is supposed to fit into an encounter, how it tends to act, and how it might interact with the monsters and terrain in the encounter. There are four trap roles: blaster, lurker, obstacle, and warder.
If a trap or hazard creates damaging areas of effect or attacks multiple targets from a distance in a regular and programmed way, it’s a blaster. Traps that propel missile weapons, create exploding blasts each round, or hurl magical effects from a spell turret all represent blaster traps. Blaster traps often serve a role similar to that of artillery monsters, but can also work as a buffer for monsters of other roles. Since many traps are harder to damage than monsters, blaster traps are a first or second line of defense that artillery or controller monsters hide behind.
Lurker traps attack and then disappear or dissipate, making them harder to attack or counter. A pendulum trap that strikes only to retract back into the wall each round, and strange motes of energy from the Shadowfell that attack the life force of those nearby before flickering out of existence for a few moments, are examples of lurker traps. Lurker traps fulfill the same role as lurker monsters. They attack and move away, and can be hard to counter without organized effort on the part of the characters.
As the name implies, an obstacle trap or hazard impedes movement, and it might stun or daze creatures to further slow them down. Obstacles are barriers and perils that characters can get past, but they have to spend some effort or take some damage, or both, to do so. Electrified squares on a floor that demand puzzle-solving to get around, magical glyphs that require Arcana to decipher and avoid, or falling portcullises that channel movement through a maze of corridors are a few examples of interesting obstacle traps. Obstacles complement brutes and skirmishers. Carefully placed obstacles offer the brute an amount of battlefield control and allow the skirmisher’s expanded movement options to shine. These perils can be extremely powerful when used in concert with soldiers and controllers, since their very presence can bolster the battlefield control that marks those two roles.
A warder trap or hazard functions as an alarm, alerting nearby guards or monsters while also doing damage to the characters who triggered it. A warder attacks to begin the encounter, dealing its damage or other effect and raising its alarm. Thereafter, some warders continue to attack and sound the alarm, while others do their thing initially and then become inactive. A warder can complement a variety of monster roles, but typically works best with groups of soldiers, controllers, and lurkers. It gives these monsters time to prepare an organized defense against intruders who have already been weakened by the trap.
Much like monsters, traps can also be designated as elite or solo threats. It’s relatively easy to convert any trap or hazard to an elite version with quick adjustments to its DCs and attacks. Many of the traps and hazards presented in this section include ways that you can upgrade them to elite as part of their presentations. On the other hand, solo traps and hazards are rare and complex things that usually occur only as a skill challenge.
USING TRAPS AND HAZARDS
More so than monsters, traps and hazards take finesse to run and place in an adventure. Some traps and hazards behave just like monsters in an encounter, attacking on their turn in the initiative order. Others attack once, usually when the characters blunder into them. Some even behave as skill challenges, requiring multiple successes to defeat before something dramatic occurs.